Arsenal’s transfer priorities this summer have been pretty hard to work out. The vast majority of transfer rumours have been about wingers rather than in defence where their biggest weakness lies.
Crystal Palace reportedly turned down £40m for Wilfried Zaha, a player who has undoubted talent but it’s hard to justify the Gunners’ focus on signing the Ivorian ahead of a centre-back.
It’s not just Zaha either, with Ryan Fraser and Yannick Carrasco other names which the club are looking at signing this summer.
The only real defensive reinforcement appears to be Saint-Etienne’s William Saliba who could be signed, just to be loaned back for a year.
It must be leaving a lot of fans scratching their heads over the club’s transfer plans this summer. One player who would fit perfectly at the Gunners, and would offer an excellent solution to their defensive issues, would be Barcelona’s Samuel Umtiti.
Catalan publication Sport published an article yesterday that said Barca are willing to listen to offers for the France international, and the asking price isn’t that high either.
Umtiti could be sold for €50m (£45m), which is not that much more than the Gunners apparently offered to Palace for Zaha.
Of course, there are some drawbacks to a move fo the centre-back. He has a knee issue which caused him to miss a sizeable number of games last season. Furthermore, there are doubts over whether he would be interested in a move to the Emirates.
Let’s address those two issues. In terms of his injury, Umtiti did not miss a matchday squad through injury from the Champions League last 16 match against Lyon on February 19th until the end of the campaign.
Certainly, you would have to do a thorough medical to check any underlying issues, but his knee hasn’t bee been troubling him for the best part of four and a half months.
Moving on to whether he’d want to make a switch to the Gunners, this is less clearcut. Sport say the two clubs most interested would be Juventus and Manchester United.
Juve are close to signing Matthijs De Ligt so they are unlikely to be in for another centre-half, while United are in a similar position to Arsenal as they don’t have Champions League football either. The Red Devils are also seemingly focused on signing Leicester’s Harry Maguire currently.
Umtiti may still be a long shot, but the Arsenal hierarchy would be much better served expending their energy on trying to sign a top-class centre-half rather than negotiating for Zaha who could cost £35m more.
